I am currently shooting a short film called “Menschen” (directed by Sarah R. Lotfi, Produced by Anastasia Cummings) and figured I’d share some screen shots of our most recent day of shooting.

The movie is supposed to take place in my beautiful home country Austria and has a very interesting story. As you can (hopefully) see by looking at the shots, it takes place during WWII when an Austrian officer (Himmelbauer) tries to find the Americans in order to save his men’s lives while also protecting a young boy with down syndrom for his atonement.

In this particular scene a young soldier approches Himmelbauer on his watch and asks him about his motives for rescuing the boy. Himmelbauer gives quite a powerful speech revealing some of his family’s past to the young soldier.

Gaffer Bret Wortley, Key Grip Chad Pulscher

When lighting a night scene you basically start with a black or empty “canvas” rather than a “pre lit” image if you were to shoot in day light, so you have a lot more choices to make. You can’t just “point the camera around” until you find a frame you like and then make it look “pretty” (of course that’s rarely a good idea) but when you light a night scene in complete darkness you literally start from scratch and that can be intimidating.
So coming up with a plan beforehand is even more essential than usual. It’s key to know which ways you want/need to look, which direction you want the “moon” to shine from and where to put your fill and so on and so forth.

Granted, technically, lighting a night scene really isn’t rocket science (you generally use the moon as a back light and then fill in) and it’s kind of the same thing over and over again. But you do run into a lot more limitations when it comes to blocking and framing since the moon never moves. And unless you want to move it for some reason and have the time and luxury to re-light for every shot, you need a plan.

In this particular scene for example we had to simplify the blocking and cut down on camera movement due to technical (and time) limitations that you have on a small set. We had to focus on what was most important to us which was to keep Himmelbauer who is on watch very isolated from the rest of the group. One way of doing so was by putting him in the darkest corner of the frame in the Wide Shot, which is also the young soldiers POV who is about to approach him.
In Himmelbauer’s CU however it was important to me that we can still connect with him emotionally as well as having him isolated and “distant” towards the other character. That’s also why it starts as an OTS but then slowly  pushes in to a CU once he is talking about his family’s past.

Now – some quick technical details.

We are shooting on a RED ONE (unfortunately with the old Mysterium sensor and not the Mysterium X) so obviously not the best tool for shooting a low light scene.  I still usually prefer bumping up the ISO a bit over raising the general light level too much. I think it’s because the contrast ratio starts to look unnatural or lit to me if I bring up the light level too much. Furthermore we didn’t have the luxury to raise the levels consistently all throughout the frame.
Of course you’d have more information to work with but I always go for what “feels right” on set rather than creating an image you have to make look right in post.

As far as lights go we were using a 4K Arri HMI as our moon to give Himmelbauer his edge and bounced a 2.5K into a griffolyn as our fill, which is all we did for the wide shot.

For the CU we just put up a bounce board to get some (easily controlled) soft fill on Himmelbauer’s shadow side and rigged another shiny board with the soft side to give him his eye light and even out the shadows between key and fill a bit.

For glass, all I had to draw from, was either my 28mm Zeiss 2.0 Distagon or a Zeiss 50mm Planar 1.4. Obviously the whole stop difference is huge when shooting in low light like this, but unfortunately framing had to take priority in at least the wide shot and I ended up using the slower 28mm. And since I prefer to keep focal lengths the same throughout a scene I stuck with it for the OTS’s/CU’s as well.

I will try to keep posting more screen grabs here as we move forward on this shoot and would love to get some comments, opinions and feedback!

Thanks,
Peter

It is still under construction but I hope you enjoy what you can see so far!

Also, I want to thank my friend James Drake who helped me put this site together!